When former Daily Kos writer, Shaun King posted this Tweet:
It seemed rather mind-numbing. Is the Danville, Virginia police department popping their hoods in order to block the view of their dashboard cameras when they make a stop? It wouldn’t be unheard of for a police department to sabotage a source of evidence. It’s been widely reported that Chicago police seems to have all kinds of equipment issues with their cameras as well. This is from January:
Last month the CPD found that 80 percent of its 850 dash cams do not record audio, and 12 percent don’t record video either. The CPD has blamed the failures on “operator error or in some cases intentional destruction,” and a close reading of that review by DNAinfo Chicago reveals the extent of the latter. Officers frequently tampered with dash cams, stashing microphones in their glove boxes or pulling out batteries. Some dash cams were found with their antennae deliberately destroyed, and others had had their microphones removed altogether.
Jalopnik decided to look into this Danville issue. They wanted to see if the Danville police had responded to this social media charge. It turns out that Danville police spoke with Snopes, the online myth-busting site. The Danville police gave this statement:
The amount of electronic equipment required in a Patrol vehicle causes a substantial amount of heat to build in the engine compartment. If you notice in the photos of the Police cars there are also cooling louvres on the hoods. This was the first attempt to stop the overheating issues which were disabling our vehicles and causing very expensive repairs. Our cars are in use 24 hours a day and the photo of the two patrol vehicles was on a day with temperatures nearing 100 degrees. The hoods aren’t opened unless the car is expected to idle with the emergency lights running for an extended period of time. The officers are equipped with Body Worn Cameras so there is a back up to an in-car camera that captures any citizen encounter far better than the in-car camera. There are video systems for inside and outside the car, an emergency light bar, Mobile Data Terminal, police Radio, printer and normal systems running off the heavy duty batteries in the cars. This generates a tremendous amount of heat which damages the engine electronics.
The accusations that this is being done for any nefarious purpose are completely false. We have had zero complaints from local citizens.
The problems are well known to Chevrolet. May I suggest contacting Chevrolet directly and demanding a remedy and retrofitting of the correction at their expense.
According to Jalopnik and Snopes, the local news got some more information from the Danville police, including their decision to end the practice in order to help build trust in the community.
In response to the controversy, the Danville Police Department will no longer raise the hoods on their patrol cars, Police Chief Philip Broadfoot told the Register & Bee Monday afternoon.
“We’re going to close them … It’s not worth the damage to the trust that we have with the community,” the chief said.
It is likely that the police weren’t being malicious. Police vehicles at a crime scene can lie idle for a long time out in the sun. Unfortunately for the vehicles, until their are less cases of dubiously dead “suspects,” those electronics and engines are going to have to feel the heat.